Student Plan to 'Decapitate' LibDems - Stephen Williams is on the 'chopping block'

After the big demo and as the dust still settles (somewhat) on all that, the NUS has decided to leave moaning about some smashed windows and instead concentrate on a 'decapitation' strategy of ousting some LibDem MPs.

Its great news that they are opening up new fronts in the war on the LibCon cuts, however my local MP Stephen Williams is one of those targeted to removal. Now I voted for him a few years back as a protest against Labour (yes I vote, I agree with Ian Bone on this issue). Now he's unhappy about all this attention:

Stephen Williams, MP for Bristol West, accused Aaron Porter, the NUS president, of playing partisan politics rather than engaging in the debate, as it emerged that students planned to try to oust him from his seat.

“It is not going to change my mind on any issue,” said Mr Williams, who has yet to say which way he will vote on the issue of increasing tuition fees.

“I don’t think students are im­pressed with it either. Rather than the NUS engaging with the issues and talking about what we are doing, they are playing partisan politics, and Aaron is playing to the Labour party gallery rather than standing up for students.”

He added: “I don’t recall them having a decapitation policy against Labour MPs who introduced tuition fees in the first place.”

His comments came as the NUS said it would make use of a coalition idea for holding MPs to account, dubbed the “right to recall” initiative, to try to force by-elections in targeted sets.

Get a grip Stephen, any campaign group must be expected to campaign for their constituents and you so publicly opposed tuition fees that a U-turn on that is just pure hypocrisy, and if you can't be trusted to vote on the basis of what you stood for in the election, then it's bye-bye time as far as I'm concerned.

Tories sabotage anti-poverty bill

Like a wolf in sheep clothing, the Tories are trying to be positioned as the 'nice party' and not the 'nasty party' but it is hard for them to keep all the tentacles in the box. A party that has more than it's fair share of closet racists, anti-science climate change denialists and other wingnuts. Now we can add the sickening spectre of the Tories killing a bill to stop 'vulture funds' where developing nation debt is brought and sold then used to lever more cash from the poverty-stricken country into the hands of grasping financiers. Plus the duplicitous way it was done to hide the identity of the individual doing the wrecking is pretty sickening too:

The frustration has been compounded by the secrecy surrounding the events in the Commons last night. During the reading, three Tory MPs were seen to huddle together on the benches before one shouted the word "object!", which under parliamentary procedure effectively stopped the bill passing. Three Conservatives were in the chamber – Christopher Chope, Andrew Robathan and Simon Burns – but none has admitted intervening.

Nasty. So who did it? Who's going to own up to the nasty act? Nobody so far, but Chope seems to be getting the finger pointed at him. We should be told.

BNP Hammered in Norwich North

Neo-Labour lost - which I am happy about. The Tories won, which I am not - but BNP, failing to get any traction in actual numbers, only managed a paltry 941 votes, putting them two placed above the Monster Raving Loony Party and overall in 7th place.

Ha ha.

The BNP realised that it was in for a drubbing in Norwich North some time ago, and though it announced its intention to stand the dodgy West in a blaze of hype that saw excitable BNP members predict their first MP, it quickly became obvious the party's campaign was firmly stuck in some very deep mud.

The party attempted to stir disharmony in the constituency by falsely claiming that African immigrants were being housed ahead of locals in Norwich, and West became a figure of ridicule as doubts about his status as a "reverend" surfaced and dogged him throughout the campaign.

Realising the party was on a hiding to nothing the BNP stopped mentioning the by-election, and national support for West was not forthcoming. Planned visits to Norwich by BNP Euro MEPs Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons were shelved so as not to taint the pair with the impending disaster, and the puny Norfolk BNP organisation was left to sink or swim on its own.

Maggie's Iraq Legacy

I have spent plenty of angry words here over Neo-Labour and their disaster/war-crimes in Iraq, however that does not mean the Tories are off the hook - no... Their heroine, Maggie was a blood soaked arms dealer amongst other things who armed Saddam;

Only where dealing in arms was concerned did she display the kind of recklessness and lack of scruple that is now being blamed for the global financial crisis, and that she did from the beginning of her first term of office. On 29 January 1981 a meeting of the overseas and defence committee of the cabinet, chaired by Thatcher, agreed to interpret the Anglo-American ban on exporting arms to either side in the Iran-Iraq war more flexibly than was honest. Within months the arms-trade subsidiary of the Ministry of Defence was building an integrated weapons complex in Basra, and over the following years the "defence allocation" to Iraq continued to multiply. Iraq did not pay up; the extent of the defaulting is not known, but this particular toxic debt had probably grown close to £3bn by the time the Iraqis invaded Kuwait and all bets were off.

The deals Thatcher made later, and apparently off her own bat, were impenetrably secret, the amounts of money vast. She sold armaments to King Hussein of Jordan, President Suharto of Indonesia and President Pinochet of Chile, offering them massive amounts of easy credit and the full support of the export credit system. In April 1985, after a series of meetings with the Saudi defence minister's son, one of them when she was away from Westminster on holiday in Salzburg, she set up the Al-Yamamah contract worth £40bn, to be paid partly in oil. It is has been reported that her son, Mark Thatcher, was paid commission of between £12m and £20m, although he has denied it.

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